Transportation Award of Excellence
Port Saint John Westside Modernization Hatch and Dillon Consulting
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CANADIAN CONSULTING ENGINEER
impacts on New Brunswick’s economy. In fact, Port Saint John has become North America’s fastest-growing container terminal. A unique port project Westside’s modernization was unique among port projects because of the size and complexity of building caissons on the site. It required major technical innovations, including the following: • The design and construction of eight 27-m high concrete caissons—believed to be the tallest backfilled caissons in North America—to create a second container vessel berth for the facility. • The design of a combination wall reinforcement for the existing wharf, to allow for dredging for the caisson mattress adjacent the existing piled structure. • The design of a piled wharf to connect the new berth’s caissons to the existing berth. • The design and management of multiple dredging contracts to ensure a deeper and more accessible main channel, as well as preparing the foundations for the caissons.
Hatch and Dillon considered the long-term outlook for the project
“The engineers’ ideas were key in facilitating the terminal’s growth.” – Jury
and designed adaptable infrastructure, including a new 9,000-ft long intermodal railyard, which is scalable to meet future growth, with track spacing chosen to accommodate reachstackers and to transition to rubber-tired gantries in the future. A modernized truck gate for the terminal, meanwhile, would be fully automated to facilitate improved throughput. Another unique requirement was for two existing cranes operating on the Rodney Marginal berth to be able to travel onto the new berth, which necessitated curved track, due to alignment constraints. The new berth had to simultaneously accommodate new 100-ft and existing 50-ft gauge cranes; not a common requirement for modern container berths. A tall order The tides, which can exceed 8 m, presented major design and operational challenges for the construction of a container berth at Port Saint John that could accommodate post-Panamax-sized vessels. In response, Hatch and Dillon designed the 27-m high caissons. Caissons of this size had never been constructed in Eastern Canada before. Due to their size, a temporary mattress was constructed adjacent to September/October 2023
PHOTOS COU RT E SY H ATC H.
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ort Saint John proactively undertook the Westside modernization project to expand its container terminal and intermodal capacity. The port engaged Hatch and Dillon to develop scalable infrastructure while maintaining port operations in some of the highest tides in the world. The objectives of the project were to both modernize the container terminal and increase its capacity to 650,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs). A second berth was built to accommodate bigger and deeper vessels. The intermodal yard, truck gate and container terminal were upgraded to facilitate growth for the entire operation. Project-specific innovations included extra-tall and environmentally appropriate caissons, a scalable rail yard and accommodating a crane track. The project was built to meet the needs of the container terminal’s operator, DP World. All major design decisions required significant collaboration with DP World to ensure they would meet operational requirements while building capacity to accommodate future growth. Hatch and Dillon’s technical expertise and mindfulness for social impacts drove the project and its successes, including lasting positive
